Flickr, once a popular source of dofollow links for SEOs has recently turned its links to nofollow automatically! Whereas you could link to your site(s) before and pass juice, now external links are nofollowed. This raises important issues:

1) Is this the future of UGC? Contribute, but dont expect any search ranking benefit?
2) Are Yahoo using the nofollow link attribute too?
3) Wheres the next best photosharing site that WILL let you get dofollow links? If Im going to contribute, I want links :P! Real, meaty ones!
4) Can someone please code up a WP plugin to nofollow all links to Flickr? If it could also pull the profile and homepage link of contributors from whom people sourced an image, that would be great [so that you can link directly to their sites and not to flickr.]
5) How is this going to affect retailers doing linkbuilding off Flickr?

As an aside, Id normally post this to my blog, but for whatever reason my laptop wont access the site, nor my host. I encourage you to check it out, in any case - SEOROI.com - and particularly the most recent post on how I didnt make $3000 last week.16 Comments

Ive been expecting this for months now.. Everywhere you turned there was someone going on about finding high PR pages on flickr to link drop on.. Unfortunately the internet scene has turned in to a "make me rich no matter what it does to anyone else" market.. And it makes good sites do things like this to combat it..

There was a session at SES San Jose and I believe Chris Silver Smith had a chart about social image sharing sites and what they offered.23hq.com was on his list and I just tested a text link the photo description and it is NOT nofollowed. Others on the list I havent tested:PbaseWebshotsFotkijust an observation, not a recommendation ;)~Carrie

Carrie thats something Ill definitely be checking out. Link sources are always interesting. Flickrs different in that theyre a Yahoo property though - their decision to change can mean stuff for Yahoos algo too. Eavesy, thanks for explaining that... funny quote from that page:"hi, i cant get this to work? what am i doing wrong? <a href="http://seoblackhat.be" title="black hat seo><img src="http://whateveremoticon/misc/happy0024.gif" alt="seo"></a>"lol...Feydakin, Matt McGee made a good point in his commentary on this that photo submitters could at least get the links in the descriptions followed...Adam, you know any good WP developers? Im dying to get a bunch of stuff programmed but its hard as hell to find good people...

Still love Flickr, but a WP plugin nofollowing links to the site would seem like the right way to go.The site may not be useful for link juice any more, but is still great for hosting content and can be a useful online marketing tool for driving traffic/adding depth to your brand

Nofollow somehow triggers a NIMBY mentality in alot of people. Its ok if you have nofollow on your blog, but if other people activate nofollow, its evil. That hypocritical SPAM attitude (if I do it, its ok; if you do it and out rank me, youre a cheating scum) is one of the reasons we have nofollow all over the place.

Excellent point Halfdeck.. I find it amazing that the herd mentality of overrunning a site with link drops is seen as a valid way to promote a website.. And when the site being talked about, promoted as a great place to spam links, and generally has its user area turned in to a link frenzy retaliates by adding a nofollow its somehow wrong.. Never mind that from now on it will be spammed by people that dont understand, or even care, about the nofollow, theyll just keep right on spamming.. @Jill, thank Google for openly telling people that links are the most important part of ranking..

Its an interesting trend: the more these UGC sites turn on NOFOLLOW to block out spammers the more these links become a valuable representation of what people are actually talking about. If I were Google trying to work out which sites to respect, I would almost start trusting NOFOLLOW links more than the default dofollows.

Heres my image sharing sites chart that Carrie referenced, if youre looking for Flickr alternatives:http://www.silvery.com/PhotoSharingComparison.html(I havent updated the chart in a few months, so you should double-check my notations if you use it.)Im sad that Flickr started Nofollowing, but, like Jill, I think that this is probably for the best overall. But, that doesnt negate the overall promotional worth one could get through ethical integration of images in Flickr, as I noted on my blog:http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2008/02/21/flickr-starts-nofollowing/My blog itself actually gets a significant percentage of traffic from Flickr since Ive used so many pix hosted on Flickr to illustrate postings.

Update: In response to mphungs earlier observation - Flickrs profile pages now do have nofollow attached to them. I think that we can see a progression in this.But this story is over a year old, so perhaps the time has come for somebody to post an update about this to Sphinn as a seperate article - one wonders if comments here will be read, at all.